Creating a successful business has always been more than simply opening shop and waiting for customers to find you. When you’re trying to improve your business, you need to have a great marketing plan, and that includes a comprehensive social media strategy. If you want to entice customers, you’re going to want to consider having a great company Facebook page.

Select Your Page Type

The first thing you need to do when you’re creating a business page is to select the proper type of business. Pages are listed together in their different categories. If you want people to be able to find your business and interact with your company easily, this first step is crucial.

Facebook currently has six different categories you can choose from for your company:

Local Business or Place

Company, Organization, or Institution

Brand or Product

Artist, Band, or Public Figure

Entertainment

Cause or Community

There are many instances where these categories overlap. For example, a local, non-profit theatre group could select entertainment, local business, or cause/community. It all depends on what the organization wants to focus on. Choose the section that will be most beneficial to your business. (more…)

Short Landing Pages Minimize Scrolling

Many people who are fans of short landing pages argue that they minimize scrolling. They know that studies suggest 80 percent of fixations occur “above the fold,” or the space that web users can see without scrolling. They insist that minimizing scrolling is even more important as web users abandon their traditional desktop and laptop computers for mobile devices. Statistics suggest that we’d rather not scroll if we can help it, but many landing pages just don’t lend themselves to the short format. (more…)

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Your “About Us” landing page isn’t just an opportunity to introduce your business to potential clients – it’s a place to ask for the sale and so much more. Think of your “About Us” page as tool in your ROI arsenal.

If your “About Us” page contains basic information – or worse, is blank – then read on to learn how to transform your “About Us” page into a sales opportunity.

Creating an “About Us” Page

A surprising number of companies don’t have a true “About Us” page. And no, a “Mission Statement” or “Company History” page doesn’t count. Creating a real “About Us” page is the first step to transforming your landing page into a sales opportunity. Search engines typically crawl for “About Us” pages and display them as part of your web results beneath your homepage. Potential customers use it as a direct link to learn more about not only your culture, but your services.

Lack of an “About Us” page can be a deterrent for those who are likely already shopping around for similar services. If your company can’t send a concise message about your offerings via a branded landing page, then what’s to stop your potential customer from finding the answer in another company that does just that? (more…)

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Studies suggest that you have around five seconds to create an impression with your landing page, so it’s vital that your page communicates your message and creates trust in a very short space of time. The first part is usually just a matter of getting the copy right, but trust can be much harder to establish. These simple tips will help you create the right impression in an instant.

Keep it Consistent

There should be consistency between the banner that your potential customers click on, your landing page, and your entire website. If these elements don’t work together, it’ll confuse your browsers. Keep the message consistent by repeating key words and slogans on all elements, and using the same tone and type of language throughout. This will reassure visitors that they’ve come to the right place.

A consistent message will also ensure that potential customers don’t feel misled. No one will be impressed if they click a banner offering a free one-week meal plan, only to find it just leads to a discount coupon for your latest recipe base. The two ideas might be related, but this kind of “bait and switch” undermines credibility.

It’s also important that the visuals carry through each digital element. It’s smart to use the same typography and colors on each component. If you do want to spice up the shading, at least make sure you choose tones from the same color palette. (more…)

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Offering a free trial is traditionally a great way for a company to get its digital foot in the door with potential customers; however, all too often, companies miss the mark when it comes to actually retaining clients. Conversions are key to your bottom line, but does your company know how to transition to sales?

How can you ensure your customers will stick around after they take a peek at your product? Read on for eight tips on retaining customers after the free trial.

1. Require a Credit Card

Some users are lazy in cancelling a trial membership that automatically converts to paid, but that isn’t why you should require a credit card. The revenue you’ll receive from this stream is little at best and the numbers will hardly reflect your actual user-base. In fact, that’s the point of requiring a credit card. You want real users with real money to take a stab at your service – a credit card number is typically verifiable, which means your free-trial sign ups will be easier to track and analyze.

Actionable Tip: Pair an automatically converting membership with a clear money back guarantee. Make it easy for users to follow through and get their money back if, for instance, they continue on for one month paid, but still decide your service isn’t right. (more…)

Since the early 2000s, online shopping cart abandonment has been a growing problem, with the newest studies citing that about 67 percent of online shoppers abandon their cart and leave the website without making a purchase. Here’s how this affects your online business.

You Are Losing 67 Out of 100 Customers

Baymard combined 27 different studies to come up with the 67% shopping cart abandonment rate. The most recent study by Fireclick puts the numbers at 62 percent. Either way, that’s about two-thirds of your website traffic.

Translating the figures into more tangible terms, it means that 67 out of the 100 people who stop by your website long enough to put an item in a cart leave without buying anything. Shopify puts this into monetary terms: If you are currently making $15,000 a month in sales, you are potentially missing out on an additional $30,000 in sales every month and $360,000 every year. (more…)

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The Wall Street Journal recently reported a study that showed emotion, more than logic, drives the decision-making process. In Internet marketing, your landing page is the place where your website elicits emotion and converts visitors into customers. How do you design a landing page that provokes an emotional response that drives conversions? Here are four tips to help you create actionable emotions on your landing page.

Understand Your Buyer

Before you can design a landing page that appeals to your customers’ emotions, you need to know exactly who they are. Look at the demographics of the people who buy your products and services. To drill down, consider using tools like WebEngage.com to conduct surveys about your visitors. Use the demographic and survey data to create one or more buyer personas for your products, and become intimate with them. Understanding who visits your site and who buys your products is an essential first step to creating a landing page that engages visitors and leads to conversions. (more…)

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The world of social media is heavily populated and still growing. With contenders ranging from the well-established behemoths to the promising newcomers, picking the right site for your business is tricky. Signing up for all of them is overkill, so you need to narrow down your options and focus on the few that best suit you and your landing page.

Facebook

With 1.23 billion monthly active users, Facebook is king in the world of social media. If you’re going to choose just one site for your social presence, this is a solid pick. Your landing page should invite visitors to like your Facebook page so you can get your posts into their regular feed. Individual stories featured on your home page will also gain weight with a like button that allows users to share that particular piece. Pair your Facebook presence with one or two other sites for a well-rounded approach to social media marketing. (more…)

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As marketing success continues to grow dependent on a digital track, truly understanding pay-per-click (PPC) makes a big difference in your business’s ad profits. When correctly managed, almost any company reaps the benefits from PPC optimization. To get the most from your PPC campaign, consider these optimization strategies:

Keyword Bidding

Using broad batch matching in a campaign tends to trigger ads for unwanted search queries. To uncover what exact search words or queries bring up your ad, whether by time period, by campaign, or by group, go to the Search Terms under Dimensions (in Google AdWords). Since exact match bidding presents large limitations, instead opt for exact match with modified batch bidding which adds a “+” in front of the keywords. This allows you to detach from phrases that deliver the wrong message in connection to your brand, but still enables longer search entries to pop the ad. Furthermore, this method facilitates negative keyword research. (more…)

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Forget classifying the youth of America as Generation Y; with nine out of ten 18 to 29-year-olds owning a smartphone, America’s young adults are Generation Mobile. In addition, 37 percent of these young adults are accessing the Internet via tablet computers. It’s not just young adults embracing mobile technology either; mobile device ownership has soared across all demographics. If you still aren’t convinced on the importance of mobile marketing, consider these mind-blowing statistics, and ways you can use them to your advantage on your landing pages.

In 2014, Mobile Internet Usage Will Overtake PC Browsing

This year, for the first time ever, people will access the Internet using mobile devices more than with traditional personal computers. So if your marketing materials and website don’t work well on smartphones and tablets, you’ll lose the majority of internet users.

Mobile users pay for every megabyte of data they consume, so they’re much more concerned with loading times than traditional web browsers. A single second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16 percent. That pause can also reduce conversions by seven percent.

Perhaps more troubling, three-quarters of users will abandon your mobile site if it doesn’t load in five seconds. Almost half of those mobile shoppers won’t be back. Optimization services can help you decrease your load time and improve mobile user’s mood.

Mobile users demand sites that work well on their devices. Responsive web design will automatically scale your site so it looks its best on any device. Alternatively you might create a separate mobile site to please smartphone and tablet users. (more…)